As someone who is currently still in education for their degree looking at the current (and likely future) economic and societal outlook, it seems like employment in fields that cause/perpetuate negative issues in the world (Big Tech/Military-Industrial Complex, industries contributing to climate change, predatory sales/financial firms) continue to maintain strong employment availability and salaries as time goes on.
However, fields that have a neutral or beneficial impact on society and the world (Medical care, Food service, public infrastructure, humanitarian aid work, environmental research), either don’t have enough available positions that people are able to transition into, have worsening working conditions due to poor management or limited resources, or just don’t pay a living wage to most who work there.
I’ve read about the broken window fallacy, and I understand how focusing on personal gain without considering the impacts on the wider picture doesn’t make for a better world. But can someone feel justified contributing to the “broken windows” of the world knowing that they weren’t presented functional alternative pathways, and try to contribute towards the solution in other ways?
I left my industry because it made me question my morals daily. It’s not worth the money
Thr unsavory businesses are paying a premium for being unsavory. There are SOME people who will not work there, which reduces the size of the labor pool and drives prices up. There are others who can be bought, for a price, and that also drives prices up.
Industries with neutral or beneficial impacts on society do have this pressure, so the wages are lower. Simple supply and demand.
You’re supposed to feel at the very least uncomfortable with it if your involvement/impact is minimal. And you should carry that guilt for as long as you’re there since the least you can do is feel bad about it. And ofc, once you don’t, you’ve lost your moral north and you become one more of them… Maybe try to steal a little or even sabotage things discreetly?
Great question the answer is pretty much no.
Either you live with the guilt or you change your moral framework to make it not bad.
Is “I couldn’t find another job because nobody wants to employ a 64-year old and I have bills to pay” changing your moral framework?
Or how about “it’s the only job offer I got out of 458 applications and I have 3 kids and a mortgage”?
Being able to make an actual choice is a huge privilege.
Nobody forced you to have kids or a mortgage
That’s what I’ve come to realize when transitioning from high school to college. I fear that accepting the guilt may lead to rationalizing the behavior - having apathy towards those your work is harming tends to prevent motivation towards changing the status quo.
I think there’s a famous phrase as well about “being paid very well to not consider the issue rationally”.
At least in my understanding: accepting the guilt doesn’t make it go away. changing your view of morality is where it rationalizes and erases it.
(which ofcourse is a fine line)
This is where I believe Karl Marx’s concept of alienation becomes more of a blessing than anything else. Marx argued, broadly speaking, that under capitalism, workers are doomed to feel disconnected (alienated) from the work they do. I think this disconnection works wonders in the kinds of jobs where what you do has negative consequences. Employees can pull a Nuremberg: “I’m just following orders,” and that way, even though they’re technically helping to create more harm in the world, from their point of view, they were just doing their job. Surviving, like all of us.
It is a clear conscience achieved through self-emptying.
(There’s also the case of people who honestly enjoy causing harm in the world, but that’s a separate issue.)
Indeed…
You can’t solve systems by focusing on individuals.
None of us a free moral agents. We’re surrounded by systems of family, culture, and law that compel and coerce us. And all of that is built in to the signifiers “employment” and “labor”. It’s incoherent to slice off a traunch of all these interconnected systems, strip it of all context, and pretend it’s a free moral choice.
Changing systems requires collective action. Individuals are weak and the Western obsession with individualism is no coincidence.
I have foundthat its pretty hard to find a job that doesnt have some form of ethical concern, whether its animal welfare and factory fsrming, the single use plastic crisis, exploitation of immigrants, perpetuating and expanding the use of fossil fuels, polluting in other ways etc… in fact its usually a combo of many of these.
Like a pharma company that produces a billion kilos of plastic waste every month, but on earth day its all about the workers carrying a fucking jar all week to measure their personal garbage production and see how they can reduce it!
The world is complex and the vast vast majority of people in the world are wonderful humans. The closest thing we have to super villains are people like Martin Shkreli, Jeffrey Epstein, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. and those kinds of folks only make up 0.01% of the world’s population. If someone’s actions appear to be evil then it’s far more likely that you just don’t understand their perspective. And you don’t have to agree with someone’s perspective to understand their perspective. For example, maybe someone is working for a defence contractor designing new missiles because they were personally affected by a terrorist attack. I can understand that perspective while also believing that better missiles won’t reduce terrorism. I’m not excusing bad behaviour, I’m explaining why other people might not see their actions as bad behaviour and will have a clear conscience.
I’m gonna be real with it. As long as the money is good I don’t really care about negativity affecting others / planet / future. 🤷♂️
It’s a dog eat dog world. My survival or ability to survive supersedes my care of others. As long as I can pay for the roof over my head and food I’m my stomach, other people don’t matter to me.
Western, ultra-materialistic, morally-vacuous take. Nothing new but that’s how all money-worshippers operate and why any group of people that share that core idea can never become a society. You can’t build with “fuck you I got mine” people.
Agreed. I have no qualms admitting I’m a fuck you got mine mentality.
And I know a good majority of people that on paper are not, but as soon as it affects them directly, that changes.
My survival is more important than yours. Plain and simple. I don’t have to virtue signal or anything. It is what it is.
You don’t have to virtue signal but you could have virtue… Idk if it’s better or worse that you’ve reached the point you simply don’t care and can be honest about it, at least with us online strangers. But I’ll stop now, have a good one.
